By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

The Quetta Massacre and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

On
August 8, 2016, over 70 people were killed and more than 120 injured in a
suicide bombing in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province. As
Balochistan is the location of Gwadar Port, the southern terminus of the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Quetta massacre highlights the
security risks facing CPEC. The Quetta attack followed a two-step tactic.
First, the terrorist group assassinated Bilal Kasi, the president of the
Balochistan Bar Association. Later that same day, they sent a suicide bomber to
infiltrate the large crowd of lawyers and journalists who had gathered at the
hospital where Kasi’s body had been taken and to detonate himself.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed
responsibility for the attack, as did the Islamic State (IS), though analysts
suspect IS’ claim might be due to Jamaat-ul-Ahrar’s past expressions of support
for it. As security experts have noted, the two-step tactic has long been used
by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including an earlier attack in
Quetta in 2013 when a Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber killed 30 mourners at
the funeral of a policeman who had similarly been assassinated (Masood, 2016; The
Soufan Group, 2016).

Security
experts note that, following a series of militant attacks between 2007-09 against
military and other “hard” targets in Pakistan, jihadist groups have resumed their
attacks on “soft” targets: not just minority ethnic groups like the Hazara or minority
religious groups like the Ahmedis, Barelvis, Christians, and Shiites; but also
relatively unprotected civilian locations like airports, schools, hospitals, polio
vaccination centers, and parks; as well as key civilian groups like lawyers and
policemen (Fair, 2016; Husser, 2016; Masood, 2016; Rifaat, 2016; Shahid, 2016; Cornish
& Peshimam, 2016). Highlighting the Pakistani state’s anxiety over the
security threats to CPEC, the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Raheel
Sharif warned that the deadly Quetta attack was “an attempt to undermine
improved security” in Balochistan, and that the terrorists had been “specially
targeting CPEC” (Sharif, 2016). The Pakistani military has promptly launched
“special combing operations” against suspected militant targets, and Pakistani
intelligence has been authorized “to go anywhere in the country and to target
anyone who was responsible for the horrific attack” (Shahzad, 2016).

For
IS, which has been actively recruiting former Taliban militants in Pakistan,
Balochistan presents a tempting target (Hussain, 2016). According to Arif
Rafiq, a security expert with the Centre for Global Policy:

“Balochistan
provides IS with an opportunity to not only strike at Pakistani interests, but
also those of China and Iran … Anti-state jihadis in Pakistan have previously
sought to target Chinese citizens in Pakistan, knowing that this would strain
relations between Beijing and Islamabad. Jihadis in Balochistan who’ve made the
switch from al-Qaeda to IS are on a similar mission.” (Hussain, 2016)

Of
particular concern for the security of Gwadar Port is IS’ recruitment of ethnic
Baloch jihadis who had formerly served with al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in
Pakistan, as they offer IS “access to the safe houses and human smuggling
networks operated by separatists and Karachi-based criminal gangs” (Hussain,
2016). However, the primary threat to Gwadar Port and CPEC’s Western Route
highway network in Balochistan remains the separatist Balochistan Liberation
Front (BLF), which has described CPEC as “an occupation of Baluch territory”
and which has threatened to “attack anyone working on the project” (Hassan,
2016). Earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence intercepted a plot by
Afghanistan and India to “encourage and assist Baloch violence against the
CPEC,” and an alleged Indian intelligence agent was subsequently arrested in
Balochistan (Lim, 2016).

Baloch
separatist violence against the Chinese development of Gwadar Port dates back
over a decade, when three Chinese engineers were murdered by Baloch separatists
in 2004. (China’s Gwadar Port project was inaugurated by then-Chinese Premier
Zhu Rongji in 2001.) The separatist violence has persisted after the incorporation
of the Gwadar Port project into the larger CPEC megaproject. In April 2015 the
BLF killed twenty Pakistani construction workers, and later that month, on the
day Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the Pakistani parliament, the BLF
attacked a radar station at Gwadar, pointedly warning both the Chinese and
Pakistani governments of their continued presence (Garver, 2006, pp. 7-10; Masood
& Walsh, 2015; “Baloch ire prompts,” 2015).

Further
north, past Balochistan, the highways of CPEC’s Western Route cross into the
contested territories claimed by the jihadist militias located in Peshawar and
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan-Pakistani
border (Hassan, 2016). Chinese projects in Pakistan have long been menaced by
these groups. Over a decade earlier, in 2004, two Chinese engineers working on
a hydroelectric dam in South Waziristan were kidnapped by the Taliban, and one
of them was killed in the ensuing rescue operation (Masood & Walsh, 2015).
Three years after this incident, Chinese workers from a massage parlor in
Islamabad were kidnapped by radical Islamists from the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque),
and furious pressure from the Chinese government forced the Pakistani
government to launch a deadly raid on the mosque. The 2007 crackdown on the Lal
Masjid had a devastating unforeseen consequence: the jihadist militias in FATA
decided to form the Pakistani Taliban, transforming their limited rebellion
into a “full-blown insurgency” (Small, 2015, pp. ix-xv; Tankel, 2016, p. 12).

Another
jihadist militia of concern to CPEC is the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement
(ETIM), a Uighur militant group which is primarily based in China’s Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region, but which has cells located across Western and
Central Asia, including a cell in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region with up to
500 jihadists (Lim, 2015c). ETIM has been responsible for a series of terrorist
attacks across China, and there are concerns that their members in Pakistan may
target CPEC projects. These concerns have increased with reports in 2014 of
ETIM jihadists joining IS. The prospect of IS-trained ETIM jihadists poses a
threat not just to China but also to China’s global projects, especially CPEC
(Gohel, 2014; Qiu, 2014; Allen-Ebrahimian, 2016). Underscoring the seriousness
of the threat posed by ETIM and other jihadist groups, President Xi announced
during his 2015 state visit to Pakistan that China will be assisting the
Pakistani military with its operations against jihadist militias on the
Afghan-Pakistani border (Haider, 2015).

To protect the CPEC
construction sites and their Chinese engineers and workers, the Pakistani
government is establishing a special security force consisting of 15,000
security personnel.

One
of the counterinsurgent strategies pursued by the Pakistani government against
the jihadist threat has been the organization and arming of civilian militias
in FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However, this strategy has serious implications
for security, as not only is there the possibility of foreign influence over
these civilian militias, there is also the possibility that such militarization
of tribal groups could lead to lawlessness, including tribal warfare. Following
the establishment of these civilian militias, armed conflict between rival
tribes has indeed been reported (Ullah, 2016, pp. 165-169).

To
protect the CPEC construction sites and their Chinese engineers and workers,
the Pakistani government is establishing a special security force consisting of
15,000 security personnel, 9,000 of whom will consist of military personnel and
the remaining 6,000 civilian personnel. One percent of China’s USD 46 billion
investment in CPEC will be used to pay for this security force, and the Chinese
government will also supply 500 security experts to train the Pakistani
security personnel. At the local level, the provincial government of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa will establish its own security force of 9,000 personnel to protect
its CPEC construction projects. The other provincial governments may follow
suit (Chaudhry, 2016; “KP to establish,” 2016).

These
security arrangements highlight the importance to which China and Pakistan both
view CPEC. For Pakistan, CPEC represents a major opportunity to upgrade its
transportation, communications, industrial, and energy infrastructure at low-
or no-interest concessional financing rates (Lim, 2015c; Markey & West,
2016). Not only is Pakistan’s economy expected to receive a major boost to its
growth from the increased trade and logistics activity along the new CPEC
highways and railways, as well as the increased manufacturing and associated
economic activities in the new CPEC industrial parks and special economic zones;
this economic development — in particular the expected increase in employment
and business opportunities in Pakistan’s economically underdeveloped regions — is
in turn expected to facilitate the establishment of long-term peace and
security in the troubled country (Yousafzai, 2016; “CPEC to Benefit,” 2016).

For
China, CPEC, like the other international infrastructure projects under the
Chinese government’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) global investment framework,
will function as one of the engines of growth underlying the Chinese economy’s
“new normal” of single-digit growth. CPEC, like the other OBOR projects, will
also assist with the Chinese government’s supply-side reform plans by creating space
in Pakistan’s industrial sector for Chinese enterprises to migrate their
industrial plant, thereby helping China reduce its domestic industrial
overcapacity. This in turn will facilitate the Chinese government’s strategy of
transitioning China from a manufacturing-based to a consumption-based economy (Lim,
2015b; “China to resolutely,” 2016). More urgently, the successful completion
of CPEC will be a crucial demonstration to the world that OBOR remains a viable
project for future investment. Such a demonstration is needed given the
unexpected recent challenges to OBOR in Southeast Asia. In Laos, the
commencement of construction of the Kunming-Vientiane high-speed railway has
been delayed over demands from the Laotian government for improved financing
terms from China (Goh & Webb, 2016). In Indonesia, the Indonesian
government has recently chosen to grant port and rail development projects to
Japan, despite having earlier considered China’s OBOR proposals for these
projects (Lim, 2015a, p. 37; Budiman, 2016; Vatvani, 2016). With so much at
stake, it is critical for China and Pakistan to ensure that the security
arrangements for CPEC are sufficient to protect its projects from the threats
posed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, the BLF, ETIM, and other groups.

References

Allen-Ebrahimian,
B. (2016, July 20). Report: More than 100 Chinese Muslims have joined the
Islamic State. Foreign Policy.
Retrieved from
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/20/report-100-chinese-muslims-have-joined-isis-islamic-state-china-terrorism-uighur/

Hussain,
T. (2016, August 13). Karachi to Kashgar: how Islamic State poses a threat to
China. South China Morning Post.
Retrieved from http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/article/2003041/islamic-states-threat-china

Shahid,
K. K. (2016, August 9). What Quetta bombing reveals about Islamic State and
Pakistani Taliban. The Diplomat.
Retrieved from
http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/what-quetta-bombing-reveals-about-islamic-state-and-pakistani-taliban/

Sharif,
R. [RaheelSharif_]. (2016, August 8). Is an attempt to undermine improved
security in Bln,specially targeting CPEC.All resources to be employed to
control situation.-5 [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/RaheelSharif_/status/762616953613721600

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.